Broken Dreams

“Broken Dreams” is a beautifully filmed, evocative look into and out of the world of depression. Filmed in Super 8 and 16mm with a hand-wind Bolex camera, it captures the essence of darkness and light, hope and despair. Experimental images take us through a series of landscapes including the bleak moon-like setting of White’s Pass in Alaska, the unendingly high office towers of New York City, the eerie facade of the Carlton Hotel all alight for the Cannes Film Festival and then fall beneath the surface of the ocean to the depths of another world filled with undulating sea grass, anemones and eels. “Let me tell you about a time not so long ago … a time when I was chased by demon dogs and fell deep and down for a long hard time. Into a well of darkness so black that few will ever know it. Into a place so timeless that fewer still will ever feel it.” As the camera falls under the surface of the sea, a hypnotic voice-over carries the viewer into a world of dreams and nightmares: “I am walking down a long corridor that faces off into a series of rooms. Each of the rooms contains an animal. In one of the rooms there is a snake. He looks at me and I can see by the look in his eyes that he wants to be inside me. I go into the room and let him enter my body. He goes into my stomach and curls up there. The rest of the day I spend walking around with the snake in my stomach. I go to meet some friends at a bar. “The snake awakens and when I open my mouth to speak the snake tries to come out. He sticks his snake tongue out at my friends. They scream and run away. ‘But you have a snake in your mouth,’ says one of them. ‘Yes’, I say ‘He is my friend he will protect me. He will protect you as well – just let him in.’ ‘No, no,’ they say ‘He is evil. We do not need his protection.’” After moving through a number of dream stories, the film takes us to Paris where a young girl skates alone on a rink. Round and round, she moves like a tiny bird flying across the surface of the ice. The images freezes and holds and we are reminded that even when darkness seems to completely envelope us, there is still hope.